Saturday 10 August 2013 03.30 EDT
First published on Saturday 10 August 2013 03.30 EDT

Fiction asks a lot of people, says Meg Wolitzer, "to tell them that you need to learn about these characters, to take time out in your day from being frightened for your livelihood and your children, to think about Susan and Bill, who don't exist. It's a nervy thing to ask." She asks it of herself every time she sits down to write – "What fiction ought to do" – and the answer had better be good. "The anxiety makes me a stronger writer."

The Interestings, Wolitzer's ninth novel, is more ambitious than any she has written so far, tracking a group of friends from the moment they meet, at summer camp, up through the decades of their lives. It has done very well in the US, so that at 54, Wolitzer has become, as a friend joked to her recently, "a 30-year overnight success". The novel deserves acclaim, but it is a surprising hit, perhaps, given its subject matter and the downbeat nature of the heroine. It is a novel about envy, but not in the grand sense. Rather, it unpicks the insidious resentment that grows between friends who start out in the same place and whose fortunes diverge. "Nobody tells you how long you should keep doing something," she writes of the least successful in the circle, "before you give up forever."

We are in Manhattan, where Wolitzer lives with her husband, a science writer, and their two college-age sons. The Interestings – the title refers to the name the adolescent friends ironically give themselves – grew out of her own experience at a hippyish summer camp in the early 1970s, where for the first time, she had a notion she might become something artistic. This was the era before "specialness" in children became thoroughly fetishised, nonetheless, Wolitzer succumbed to the notion that talent was all, and set about daydreaming a romantic future for herself. "I went off to a summer camp and became immediately pretentious and all that. I knew that it had to open there, and open then."

There the parallels end. Wolitzer, whose mother was a writer and father a school psychologist, had a family who supported her aims, and after graduating from Brown University in 1981, she published her first novel, Sleepwalking, a year later. Jules, her heroine in The Interestings, attempts and fails to become an actor, retrains as a therapist, and – in a piece of sly positioning – marries an ultrasound technician who has no desire to be anything other than what he is, to her alternating relief and exasperation. Meanwhile, Ethan and Ash, her best friends from camp, make piles of money and Jules struggles to conceal how unfair she finds it all.

Which in some ways it is. The novel cleverly skewers the structural advantages that enable some careers over others, when the raw material is roughly the same. It's not just a question of money. "In terms of class, the fact that Ash had this family who always loved what she did, that's something we associate with entitled people; the assumption that there's someone out there who wants to see what you're doing. Most people don't have that. I really wanted to see the complexity of what it takes to succeed. How many things behind the scenes work in your favour or against you."

There are parallels between The Interestings and Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty – two novels about class unfolding against the backdrop of the Aids era. Wolitzer remembers coming to New York with no money in her 20s and being surprised as the lives of herself and her friends started to diverge. "I lived in a tiny apartment, and there was this sense that we all had talent and would move forward. And suddenly people were picked off and shunted into these beautiful apartments that obviously their families had paid for, and I hadn't been told that this was going to happen. And it really could affect the trajectory of your whole career."

Jules does not have cheerleaders at home, but neither is she from a bad background. The ordinariness of her story is, perversely, what makes it so interesting and also what makes her so irksome. Protagonists don't have to be likable, but it is a risk to make them this irritating. Jules's therapy practice thrives, but she sees herself as a failure. She professes, repeatedly, to hate her life. It's not so much that she wants what her friends have, so much as she would like them not to have it. "Readers get mad with writers if the characters aren't really virtuous, so I took out the scene where she beat back the wild boars to save her child." She smiles. "The character is not standing for women everywhere. I had to write that on my forehead and look in the mirror. I had to let myself be free to be really irritated. If she'd never met Ethan and Ash, she would love her life. Even with a depressed husband, she would feel better about her life." There it is: Jules feels average in a world where everyone has to be gifted. "Not everybody's talented," writes Wolitzer. "What are they supposed to do, kill themselves?"

She, on the other hand, was identified early on as someone with talent. Wolitzer was in the last generation of college students to win an internship at Mademoiselle magazine, the same programme Sylvia Plath had been on 20 years earlier, which formed the basis for her novel, The Bell Jar. By the late 1970s, the whole thing was an anachronism, particularly the "women's hotel", so memorably rendered by Plath, and which to Wolitzer and her peers seemed frankly absurd. "A women's hotel? What's that about? Men – we're finally free of those people!" Nonetheless it was a good experience. "Plath hung over the whole thing. So it had a kind of nostalgic literary quality to it."

You hear a lot about novelists whose fathers were writers. It's more unusual, as in Wolitzer's case, to see the matrilineal line. She grew up in Long Island in fairly modest circumstances, but in a family that very much valued reading. Her mother, Hilma Wolitzer, was a "classic auto-didact" who had an innate writing sense that she came to later in life, when she started publishing stories and novels. It was a useful example for Wolitzer, although not always an enticing reality. On the one hand, she says, her mother used her first pay cheque from writing to buy a car so she wasn't dependent on her husband. And as a writer, she was also allowed to get 11 not 10 books out of the local library, which her daughter construed as a kind of celebrity.

On the other hand, she says, "writing wasn't romanticised. It's a pretty ugly thing. I'd see my mother in a bath robe sitting at the typewriter, which sounded like a blender, and I'd come home from school and she'd be in the same place. It was a little embarrassing. There's some sense that a writer mother is a little unsavoury; a little freakish. They don't put on a suit and leave the house. So, I was very proud of her, but I was also sometimes embarrassed – you know, there was some sexual content in her work."

Her own children clearly felt this ambivalence, too. Wolitzer remembers walking past a McDonald's with one of her sons when he was young and noticing the sign, Now Hiring. "And he said, 'Maybe you could get that job.'"

Her mother did encourage Wolitzer to at least try to become whatever she wanted in life. There is a scene in The Interestings in which Ash, a moderately talented theatre director with family money behind her, is asked whether a mother should discourage her child from pursuing a risky profession such as acting or directing. "And Ash says something like, 'The world will whittle her down, a mother never should.' And I feel that I really got that attitude from my mother. She would say, 'Oh how wonderful, that's great, do that,' which was pretty unusual."

She knew her writing life would be different from her mother's in that she wouldn't have a husband's salary to fall back on. Wolitzer has often written about the sacrifices made by ambitious women with families, or of women raising families alone. In This Is Your Life (made into a film by Nora Ephron in 1992, with the title This Is My Life) a woman stand-up comedian struggles to maintain a life for herself outside of bringing up her children. The Ten Year Nap is the story of women coming back to work after their children have grown up. The questions that interest her – how families configure themselves and where identity resides when too many demands are made on it – are not uniquely "female" although she has, over the years, been sold very much as a women's writer. Last year, Wolitzer wrote a piece for the New York Times that generated a lot of chat about the gender-specific ways in which women as opposed to male novelists are marketed; when Jeffrey Eugenides writes a domestic novel such as The Marriage Plot it is greeted as a literary event in a way that it might not if he were female. "Many first-rate books by women and about women's lives never find a way to escape 'Women's Fiction' and make the leap on to the upper shelf where certain books, most of them written by men, are prominently displayed and admired."

It is tedious to go on about it, she acknowledges, but "there's still this idea that the intimacy of fiction is female – the private space is something women create – while non-fiction is like the public square. When I wrote that piece for the New York Times I had watched for many years how every woman writer I know felt a little depressed about the question of how do I get people not to see my fiction as in the province of women only? In‑house, too; the publisher looks at it and knows that your audience is women, mainly, and a book is given a certain jacket and then sent to a book critic. So, they'll give it to Julian Barnes, or they'll give it to the author of That Firefly July. What are you going to do?"

The Interestings has a studiously gender-neutral cover, "a horrible term that makes it sound like a beige cover with a flat person on it. Like a unisex bathroom," but which nonetheless Wolitzer insisted on. It's not just publishing. When This Is Your Life was turned into a film, Wolitzer saw a similar process take place in the movie industry. It was hawked around the studios and, underpromoted and underinvested in, ultimately "tanked", she says, although it has a very loyal following (Lena Dunham recently picked it for a series of films she curated at the Brooklyn Academy of Music). "You have no idea what it took to get this made. It took them years. One place where Nora went, some studio person asked his girlfriend, 'You're a woman, what do you think?' Like this woman was going to decide the fate of this story about a mother and her daughters? It really was a labour of love. I met Tom Hanks at something and he said he chose to do Sleepless in Seattle because of that movie. Nora was just indefatigable and got it made."

The problem, Wolitzer says, is that "we tend to think of the stories of boys and men as being universal; father and son. The Road; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. We will become very invested in stories about fathers and sons," more so than in mothers and daughters. "You want to write the best book you can every time, you want to write something new. You could try to game the system ... and things have changed in good ways."

Wolitzer has a writing theory – if after turning out 80 pages the novel hasn't flown, it's time to tear it up and start again. This happened, once, with a book she was writing about Freud's Dora. Wolitzer had done a lot of research, gone to Austria, and after 80 pages had ground to a halt. "I was having to write in a constrained way. I felt very hemmed in by the research. It was more conceit than anything else, you could see the pitch as if it was a movie. Then I just abandoned it. I broke out and wrote The Wife in reaction to that – the first first-person book I'd ever written. It's painful to abandon something. But 80 pages, you're not going to kill yourself. 150 pages and you'll say what have I done with my life?" Material rarely goes to waste. "You use it for other things. You make soups out of it." (The Austrian stuff eventually ended up being used in a single scene in her novel The Position, in which a character appears in a play about Freud. The entire enterprise boiled down to the line, "Herr Doktor?" to Wolitzer's amusement.)

She sold her first novel for $5,000, a sum that at the time she thought would last "until about now". She has always supplemented her income with teaching, not least for the healthcare plan, although she is mindful of the fact that it takes up a lot of the energy she could be using for writing. She and her husband both work from home, and although it's "messy", she says, for the most part it works well. "Sometimes we walk past each other like people in the subway. I don't even look at him, because you don't want to break your concentration. It's fabulous and hard, like many things. We're really fortunate to live by our wits in this way, but when I go to people's houses and they say, 'This is my office,' and it's an oasis, my life has never looked like that."

The same goes for bringing up the children, which they did together. "At the time we were very proud of splitting everything. If someone had a deadline and there was a vomiting child, the non-deadline person was hands on. Looking back, there was a lot of half-parenting, too, which is when you're really distracted and you crave to be at your book, but you're playing Cluedo; so, both the game and that paragraph come out mediocre. It doesn't entirely work. But it mostly worked. It's not ideal but it's pretty good."

Looking back at her work, she reflects that "some books feel like the sorbet between courses. And there are others that feel like the courses. Some of them aren't great; and some of them are better." Either way, "You have to keep doing this; you have to keep writing."